Friday, December 18, 2015

Now they call it Wissotsky Tea, but on this ad, which ran very small in the Warheit every few weeks in late 1914 and early 1915, it was spelled Wisotsky's Tea.

Notice at the top of the ad it saysװיסאָטסקי׳ס טהע
while at the bottom left it saysטהעע
so they couldn't spell "tea" the same way twice in less than an inch!

Paraphrased from Wikipedia:

The Wissotzky Tea Company was founded in 1849 by Kalman-Volf Yankelevich in Moscow. He was born to a family of poor merchants who were smart enough to figure out tea was going to be big. They sold tea throughout the Russian Empire and by 1904 extended operations to Germany, France, New York and Canada. From the early 1900s through 1917, Wissotzky Tea Company was the largest tea company in the world.

In 1917 the company gradually ceased operations in Russia, and the Wissotzky family emigrated to the U.S and Europe, opening branches in Italy, Danzig, Poland, and additional European countries.

I did a lot of reconstruction of this ad but couldn't read, on any of the surviving copies I saw, what it said in Cyrillic above В. Высоцкий и К° on the right so I couldn't "fix" it. I've shared a couple other Wissotzky advertisements below. Click for larger images.